The Riddle at Home Plate

Marcus was the biggest **bull** on the varsity baseball team — six-foot-three, 230 pounds of pure intimidation, with shoulders like a truck and a scowl that could silence a dugout full of freshmen. Nobody expected much from him mentally. That was the joke. Big Marcus, the human pitching machine, zero thoughts behind the eyes.

Until the day he was caught in the library reading about Egyptian mythology.

"Yo, Marcus," I'd said, sliding into the chair across from him. "What's with the **sphinx** obsession?"

He'd slammed the book shut like I'd caught him watching something deeply embarrassing. His ears, I noticed, turned pink.

"It's not an obsession. It's... interesting. The riddle thing."

"Riddles?"

"Yeah." He'd looked everywhere but at me. "Nobody expects you to think. You're just supposed to hit home runs. It's like being a sphinx. Everyone looks at you and sees this big mysterious thing, but they don't realize you're just waiting for someone to actually ask you something real."

I'd stared at him, and suddenly Marcus wasn't just the bull anymore. He was a person with thoughts I'd never bothered to wonder about.

Two weeks later, I found him behind the bleachers, **running** drills until he could barely stand. His hands were shaking.

"What's going on?" I'd asked.

"Coach says my reaction time's off," he'd said, voice tight. "My mom's got me on these new **vitamin** supplements. They're supposed to help with focus, but I think they're making me worse."

He'd looked at me then, really looked at me, with eyes that were tired and frustrated and entirely too human.

"Sometimes I hate it," he'd admitted. "Everyone expects the bull to just charge. Nobody asks what happens when the bull doesn't want to charge anymore."

"So stop charging," I'd said.

He'd laughed, surprised. "Yeah? And do what?"

"I don't know. Figure out your own riddle."

He hadn't made varsity again the next season. Nobody knew why. But sometimes, when I walked past the library, I'd see him through the window, reading something with a small smile on his face. And the baseball field felt a little less like a battlefield and more like just a place where people played games.

Some riddles, I learned, don't have answers. They just have better questions.